


Island Shores

by Aithilin



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pre-Relationship, mer-Noctis
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 13:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19427083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/pseuds/Aithilin
Summary: Nyx had never thought he would be the one to lose his footing and slip beneath the rough waves. He also never expected to be rescued from drowning by a strange creature he only heard about in stories.





	Island Shores

Nyx had known better. 

He had grown up on the jagged, raw coasts of his islands. He knew the dangers that came with the tides and the rocks and the unseen myriad of things that were carried in on the tides. He had watched men more experienced than him, more surefooted on rigging and boards than him slip beneath white-tipped grey waves, never to surface again. 

He once thought— when the panic and the rush to help had subsided— that it at least looked like a peaceful way to go. It was easier to explain to the family later. There would be a cursory funeral after the soft words of ‘they just disappeared beneath the waves’ had finished echoing between them. No body to wrap and burn on the beaches, no gifts to leave to beg for a merciful ghosts; there would be the customary feast and festival from the family, but driftwood would be wrapped in kelp harvested from just off the coast, and the bonfire that raged would send sympathetic smoke out to the unforgiving sea. 

And then it was over, just as easily and quietly as the loss itself. 

Nyx had always thought is seemed like a peaceful way to go. An elegant return to the waters that had formed them. 

But that was before the seawater burned his throat and lungs. Before the long tendrils of kelp wound its way around his body— tighter and tighter as he struggled against the weed, his life ending in flashes of green and the burn of salt water. 

His knife was lost somewhere in the mass of writhing green. His hands ripping at the net of weed that had him trapped. And his lungs threatened to burst or burn as he lost sight of the waves above. 

His last thought were for his friends left above on the ship. Libertus and Crowe, he knew, would be held back from jumping in after him. Pelna would try to reason with them, Luche would take the helm to steer them all away. 

In a few days, it would all be over and he would be as much a memory as those others. 

He lost sight of the world as his body took a breath.

And then another. 

There was hot sand beneath him, clinging to him. Patches of bile and watch expelled sometime before he fully woke already drying in the sun. 

His thoughts were hazy, blurred, churning with the calmer sea lapping at the coarse sands. 

He lay back with a groan on the sand, and caught his breath— trying to decide if he was dead. He could feel things— the sand, the sun’s heat, the water’s lapping at his feet. He could feel the burn in his lungs as he tried to breath deep, the tickle sending him curling to his side with a wet cough. 

“Please stop dying,” a voice said from the water’s edge. “It’d be really annoying given how heavy you are.”

Nyx decided he was dead, he had to be. There was a young man on the beach, looking very unimpressed in the shallows a few feet away. It wasn’t the presence of the young man that struck him, but the long, dark, scaled tail that extended beyond him from the waist down. “What?”

“You were heavy,” the man said again, leaning his chin on very human hands as he watched Nyx sit up; “I had to get Gladio to carry you in.”

“What’s Gladio? Who are you?”

“His name,” spoke a second voice from the other side of the beach line, where the long dry grasses of this island Nyx found himself on led to the thinned line of trees. Looking at it now, he wasn’t certain how big the place was, or where it was. But the man waking toward him with a basket of what looked like bandages and bottles seemed to be a proper sign of civilization; “is His Highness, Noctis Lucis Caelum. And you should lay back down until I’ve actually made sure you are not actually dying.”

“Who are you?”

“Ignis Scientia,” the man pushed him back down to the sand; “a pleasure. As I said, lay back, I haven’t tended a Galahdian in a while.”

It took some time before Ignis was satisfied that he was in no danger of dropping dead, but Nyx was then led to a little cottage along another stretch of rockier shores. He could see the telltale dips and outcrops of where the tide pools would be, where the birds would nest, where the eels would be able to slither across the wet stones where necessary. The waters of the high tide lapped and licked at the weathered wood of a dock that extended out over the rocks on a sturdy stilt foundation, and Noctis was already sat there waiting for them. 

Nyx thought he had known better, once. 

He had known better than to lose his footing in rough seas. To trust the strangers on unknown islands, where the creatures of fishermen’s fairy tales greeted him with smiles. 

Somewhere out across the deceptively calm waters was Galahd and its familiar shores. There would be smoke rising from a funeral pyre of driftwood and seaweed rising over the same grey, churning waters somewhere out there along the jagged cliffs of his youthful memories. There was a lifetime away from where ever he was right now, waiting for him, mourning him. 

But it was nice waking in the morning to high tide, to Noctis waiting with a fresh fish or lobster trudged up from whatever depths he explored. Or returning from hunting in the island’s forest, to see Noctis lounging in a tide pool with a smile. 

Galahd was out somewhere across the wide waters, but Nyx supposed he could take his time finding a way back.


End file.
